


Hello Stranger

by BleedingInk



Series: Hello Stranger [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Resurrection, spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 04:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15622728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: Castiel requests Rowena's help to try and bring Meg back to life in the hopes she'll know a spell to free Dean from Michael's possession.





	Hello Stranger

**Author's Note:**

> This was written as a birthday present for my friend, Mel. Hope you enjoy it!

Castiel watched Rowena’s face closely. The witch had an eyebrow arched up so high it almost disappeared underneath her red bangs and her hazel eyes were staring right back at him. Her lips twitched, attempting a smile, but then they fell back down in a straight line.

“You’re serious,” she stated. She sounded surprised, as if, for some reason, she believed that Castiel had been joking.

“Can you do it?”

Rowena scoffed and leaned back down on the arm chair she was sitting on.

“I’m… shocked, Castiel. Never thought I’d see the day you’d come to me for help.”

Castiel breathed in deeply, trying to keep his patience. He hadn’t come to Rowena with his request to be mocked and if the witch insisted on doing so, he would leave and look for another way.

Except that he didn’t know if there was another way. With Jack’s grace gone and Sam obsessively tracking Michael, he was left to try out this plan on his own. And Rowena was probably the only being in the world powerful enough to attempt it.

“Can you do it or not?” he insisted.

Rowena let out an amused chuckle.

“I’m not sure it _can_ be done. By anyone,” she stated. “I tried and the reapers didn’t like that very much.”

“It will be different this time.”

“How so?”

Castiel licked his lips. He knew after he said the next sentence, there would be no turning back.

“Because I will help you design the spell,” he said. “And we will be using my grace to power it.”

Rowena’s hazel eyes shone bright, but that was the only sign that she was interesting in what Castiel was saying. She had, as Dean would have put it, a good poker face. But Castiel knew Rowena was always eager to get her hands on every any ounce of power she could reach and the offer to learn how to use Enochian magic from an angel was too tempting for her.

She still didn’t say yes right away.

“Your _depleted_ grace,” she pointed out. “Are you sure it will be strong enough to handle something like this? And even if it is… you know Billie is going to show up here and chastise us for even trying. Natural order, blah, blah, blah…” She moved her hand in order to imitate a mouth speaking.

“These are… extraordinary circumstances,” Castiel said. “It’s the only way we may recover lore that was used against angels once upon a time, lore that could help us free Dean from Michael…”

“Yes, yes, I heard you the first time,” she interrupted him.

She stood up and took a step closer to him. She was several inches shorter than him and even as “depleted” as Castiel was, he still knew he could overpower her should it come to that.

But the way her eyes pierced right through him still made him feel suddenly very uncomfortable.

“But that’s not the real reason you want to tear open the universe and ask your… what did you call it? Your _friend_ a quick question.”

“I do need to ask her that question,” Castiel pointed out.

Rowena breathed in deeply and rolled her eyes, as if she was losing her patience with him.

“There are other angels. Other demons. Fergus is there…”

“Crowley won’t know this,” Castiel cut her off. “There aren’t any ancient demons left and the ones we know are there… they won’t be friendly to us. It has to be _her_. She’s the only one who will actually know the spell to cast off angels from their vessels and who will tell us how to use it.”

“Why?” Rowena insisted.

“I told you why…”

“You’ve told me the excuses you’re going to sell to Sam when he asks why you tried something this complicated and dangerous,” the witch snapped. “But you don’t have to lie to me. We’re pals, aren’t we Castiel?”

Castiel bit the inside of his cheek to avoid telling her it was hard to consider her “a friend” when she had put a mad dog spell on him and had him kill several of his kind. He was moments away from walking away and attempting it by himself. But he knew he wasn’t going to succeed without Rowena channeling the spell, so after taking a deep breath, he looked at her in the eye and relented.

“Your son killed her.”

“I’m sure. He killed a lot of people. We all have.” Rowena shrugged.

“He wouldn’t have if I had gone back to protect her,” Castiel replied. “And I didn’t know… for a very long time, I didn’t… look for her. After everything she did for me… I left her to die.” He made a pause to gather himself and continued: “Of everyone I have ever failed – and I have failed so many people and so many angels – if I can make it up to just one of them… it has to be her.”

He hated it. He hated how vulnerable it made him feel to say out loud what he had been thinking for so long, even more since he found out it was possible to return from the Empty. He hated the way Rowena stared at him, silent and with an unreadable expression. And he hated the possibility that she was going to tell him there were other less desperate, less dangerous, less selfish ways in which he could help Dean.

He knew this already. But he needed to at least know he had tried to bring her back. He had so many things to tell her…

“Oh, very well,” Rowena sighed. “I’ll help.”

It was Castiel’s turn to be surprised.

“You… you will?”

“What can I say? Deep down, I’m a romantic.”

 

* * *

 

It was a five hours drive and Rowena wasn’t the most agreeable road trip companion, but Castiel sucked it up. Now that he had made the decision to take this chance and convinced her to help him out, he was going to stop at nothing.

Even if it meant having to deal with the witch sitting right next to him sighing and asking how much longer it would be.

“You’re the one who said we needed some sort of connection with her to try and bring her back,” Castiel pointed out.

“I’m not sure this is exactly the right thing though. We might end up making a mistake and bringing back the girl who used to live in that body.”

“We won’t,” Castiel said curtly. After five years, he knew only the bones of the body she had occupied remained, but that didn’t change anything. He had been given a hunter’s funeral after his last death and he had been able to return regardless.

Rowena scoffed and started playing with the radio to distract herself.

Castiel had made this trip many times after finding out the truth. He had discovered, through lying and deception he didn’t feel any guilt for anymore, that she had been kept on the County’s morgue while her murder was being investigated, even though it was impossible that they would find their killer or bring him to justice. They had also failed to locate a next of kin that would claim her, so in the end, she had been buried in a pauper’s grave.

Rowena complained about having to walk among the graves in heels, but one glare from Castiel was enough to keep her quiet.

The night was warm over their heads, with crickets chirping among the weeds around them. They stopped in front of the gravestone, a simple cement rectangle on the floor. There were several others just like it when Castiel first went to visit that grim, abandoned corner in the cemetery, and several others had joined her with time. Castiel knelt in front of it and with a wave of his hand cleaned away the dust and grime so the inscription that announced the date of her death could be revealed.

They had buried her under the name “Jane Doe”.

Castiel had known her as Meg.

He felt a pang of doubt all of the sudden.

“Will it matter that I never knew what her real name was?”

Rowena hesitated for a moment as she down the basket where she was carrying her all of her witchcraft implements.

“Names are powerful, no doubt. But I think, in this case, it doesn’t matter too much who she was. You’re trying to call her for who she was for you.”

That made sense. Whoever she had been before, before Lucifer, before the Apocalypse, before Crowley had turned her into a fugitive… it didn’t matter since she had chosen to be simply Meg.

He smiled to himself. Meg would’ve protested at the notion that there was anything “simple” about her and he would have to agree. He’d been able to see past her human mask, past the walls she had built around herself, even if it’d only been for a little while. He’d found pain on the other side, thorns and torturous memories. And he’d found beauty as well, a capacity for loyalty and for love that he’d believed impossible in demons up until he met her.

And it was time he returned everything she had done for him.

He helped Rowena settle down the black mantle with the pentagram and the candles with the Enochian symbols he’d carved on them. They were all designed to allow him to see beyond the barriers of this world, to reach into the Empty and call her name. He wasn’t as powerful as Jack had been, and he didn’t know if Meg would be able to escape once he’d waken her up. There were too many ifs, too many questions.

But as Rowena started the incantation, lighting the candles one by one, Castiel paid no more mind to them. The air was crackling and whispering with the charged words of the witch and a soft wind started blowing around them, making her cape and his trench coat flap in the air.

She extended the bowl out to him and Castiel took out his angel blade. He could feel his grace pulsating right under his skin. Not with the searing force it’d once had, not the powerful blinding light he’d possessed. But still powerful enough, or so he hoped.

He cut deep underneath his skin, gritting his teeth as the silvery liquid dripped down to mix with the rest of the ingredients. Rowena’s voice became louder and the wind blew harder with every drop of his grace that fell to mix with the rest of the ingredients.

Castiel’s breathing became deeper and suddenly he was aware of everything around him: the shades of the trees, the soft violet glow of Rowena’s eyes, every single star above their heads and the dark space between them. The dark space that was suddenly growing, as if the sky was zooming in on them. He realized, with a jolt, that the spell was working.

There was a lurch in his stomach and complete, impenetrable darkness surrounded him. A familiar voice spoke in his head with open irritation:

_Why do you wake me? Why do you bother me again?_

Castiel ignored it. There were thousands of slumbering presences around him, soft sighs and silence. He focused on his memories of her: her raspy voice, her cruel laughter, the warmth of her mouth against his…

“Meg,” he called out.

The voice in his head became furious.

_Are you trying to take her away? You can’t do that! You don’t have the power to do that!_

“Meg!” Castiel called again, pushing every ounce of his power into that simple name, that simple word that meant everything and nothing at all.

The air around him changed. The sighs and whispers grew louder as the voice of the Empty boomed:

_If you wanted to be with her, you should have stayed! She belongs to me now!_

“MEG!” Castiel roared with desperation.

_ENOUGH!_

The darkness itself rose to meet him, like a powerful wave that shook him with rage.

_You wanted to go back so badly, THAT IS WHERE YOU WILL STAY!_

Castiel opened his mouth to scream her name one more time but the wave caught him and squashed him in his undertow, throwing him for what felt like a long, interminable fall.

He woke up on the cold ground, a ground that was trembling violently underneath him. Black clouds appeared over their heads, swallowing the moon and the stars as the wind became a hurricane around them. Rowena had her hand extended over the candles and kept reciting the incantation frantically, but it was pretty clear that she was losing control.

“Rowena, stop! Stop!” Castiel screamed, trying to make himself heard over the storm.

Rowena continued chanting as she reached for the candles, trying to turn them off and cut the connection, finish the spell, but even as Castiel rose to his feet to help her, they weren’t fast enough: lightning fell down as thunder roared over their heads, the wave of energy sending them flying across the air. Castiel crashed against a headstone and moaned in pain.

It was over even before he got back on his feet. The storm wound down as easily as it had been conjured and after a few violent aftershocks, the ground stopped moving. Rowena lied down several feet away, apparently unconscious and tangled up in her cape.

Castiel took a few hesitant steps to the grave site and held his breath when he saw what they had done.

The ground where the lightning had stricken was burnt and darkened in a perfect circle. And the headstone that marked Meg’s burial site had been broken in two.

 

* * *

 

Billie came to look for them at dawn, much later than Castiel had thought she’d be there. She appeared in the motel room where they had taken refuge, because Rowena had declared that the spell had taken too much out of her and she needed to rest and complain a lot, apparently, to get better.

Though to be fair, the witch did look pale and sickly. She barely raised her head from the bed where she was laying when the Reaper showed up.

“Blame him!” Rowena said immediately, pointing an accusing finger at Castiel. “It was his idea this time!”

“I know,” Billie said, staring daggers into Castiel with her dark eyes. “Didn’t I warn you and the Winchesters that I would not tolerate any more disturbances in the natural order of things? Didn’t I say so, Castiel?!”

Castiel lowered his eyes, but it was hard to feel scared or regretful for what he had done when he was so full of disappointment and grief.

“You can punish me, if you must,” he whispered. “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work.”

“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong.”

He didn’t have time to ask her what she meant. In the blink of an eye, they were out of the motel room and inside a busy hospital lobby. Nurses and doctors walked past them without paying an ounce of attention to them. Castiel wondered if they were invisible or if humans just were too busy to care for them.

Billie made him a gesture to follow her.

“Why did you bring me here?” Castiel asked as he walked besides her. “Where are we, exactly?”

“St Jude’s Hospital, a few miles away from where you and Rowena did your little experiment,” Billie replied as he guided him down the halls and past several patients’ rooms. “You need to see what you did.”

Without a word, she opened one of the doors. Castiel’s breath got caught in his throat.

There was a woman in a wheelchair parked right next to the window. She was wearing a hospital robe and her blonde hair fell loose over her shoulders. Her head was turned away from them, but even before she spun to look at them, Castiel already knew that she would have a round, pale face and sweet deep brown eyes.

“Hello,” the woman said with a husky whisper and smiled at them. It was a strange, forced gesture, as if she couldn’t quite remember how to do it right. “Are you the… the detectives who are here to interrogate me?”

It was impossible. Castiel scrutinized her face, looking for a sign of recognition, half-expecting her to jump from her chair and run at him, to call him “Clarence” with the same cheekiness as always.

But she remained where she was.

“Y-yes,” Castiel stammered. He took a hesitant step inside of the room.

She clumsily rolled away a little so he could sit on the chair designated for visitors.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Apparently my legs decided to stop working and I’m still getting the hang of this.”

She wasn’t the same he had known. There was still darkness swirling underneath her skin, but he had to look closely to perceive it. As if her demonic nature itself was… dormant. He wondered if he touched her, if he called upon her using his grace, if it would wake up and come back in full force.

If she would stop staring at him as if he was a stranger.

“What do you remember?” he asked her.

“Not much.” She shrugged. “I woke up by the side of the road, naked.” She stuck her tongue out, like it was a joke. “No ID, no idea of how I got there either. I couldn’t walk, but luckily a driver spotted me.”

“Nothing else?”

She frowned and glanced away, as if she was thinking for a moment.

“I remember… there was someone calling my name in the darkness,” she said, hesitantly. “Meg. At least I think that’s who I am.”

Castiel nodded. He hoped the lump in his throat wouldn’t reflect in his voice when he asked his next question:

“And how are you feeling?”

“Well… generally pretty good,” she said. “Physically, there seems to be very little wrong with me. Mentally, I’m a little scared. This whole amnesia thing really gives you an identity crisis, you see.”

Castiel frowned at her and caught a glimpse of her, of who she used to be, in the way she smirked at him. As if she’d just told a joke and it amused her that he wasn’t quite getting it.

He forced himself to smile back.

“Of course.”

“I’m not worried, though,” she said. “Something will turn up eventually, right, detective…?”

Only then Castiel realized that she hadn’t asked to see his plaque. He fumbled for a name for a few seconds.

“… Masters,” he said in the end.

She blinked at him, and for a second, he thought maybe that had been it, that it had been the last she needed to wake up, to remember…

But then she only smiled at him again.

“Detective Masters,” she repeated, with a smile. “I don’t know why, but I trust you’ll find my family.”

Castiel couldn’t stay there any longer. He stood up and took a deep breath.

“I will do my best,” he promised. “Take care of yourself, Meg.”

He felt her eyes boring into the back of his neck. He resisted the urge to turn around, grab her by the shoulders, scream at her to please remember, crash his lips into hers…

Billie closed the door behind her.

“How is it possible?” Castiel asked, shuddering.

“You woke her up,” the Reaper told him. “But not everyone is strong enough to drag themselves from the Empty in one piece like you did.”

Castiel felt his knees were trembling and had to lean against the wall. He wanted to cry, to scream until every single glass in the hospital cracked and shattered. He clenched his fist and stood up straight to face her.

“Will she ever remember?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if she’ll want to remember. She certainly seems… content this way.” Billie tilted her head at him. “You see the irony, don’t you? You wanted to bring her back to help you in saving Dean. But now she’s useless ‘cause she can’t recall what you needed to know.”

“No!” Castiel protested. “She’s not useless! She’s…”

His words faltered. He run his fingers through his hair, trying not let desperation get the better of him.

Billie just watched him in silence. For a moment her eyes looked softer and kinder. Almost as if she pitied him a little.

“I’m not going to punish you, Castiel,” she told him. “I think you already have enough punishment with the choice you have to make.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can jog her memory and bring back every single painful thing she’s had to go through. Hell, the tortures she endured, the way she died. Or you could just… let her be. Lucifer is dead. So is Crowley. No one knows she’s alive and she wasn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things to begin with. No one is going to come looking for her.” Billie shrugged. “Either way… it’s your call.”

She disappeared before he could muster an answer.

He stayed where he was, trembling with rage and sorrow, knowing full well that Billie had basically told him that he needed to choose which of his friends he would rather save.

Seven years before, Meg had told him the truth about his nature. Dean had come looking for him so he could help Sam. Castiel had to atone for that, because the sorry state Sam was in had been his fault. But Meg had done nothing to contribute to the mess they were in at the present. She had saved them all and instead of letting her rest in peace, he had dragged her back to the fight.

Rowena had been right. He had been selfish. He hadn’t done this for Dean.

A nurse walked past into the room followed by two men in suits.

“Meg?” she called. “These detectives are here to speak to you.”

“I… I don’t understand. Detective Masters was just here…”

Castiel moved fast. He walked past the door, already knowing what he was going to do.

He still couldn’t help to steal one last glance at her confused face as he walked away from her for good.


End file.
